Meet the free software gang

Meet the pieces of free software working together to build a complete free software system.

There are thousands of pieces of free software, many of which are listed in our directory of free software, but of these projects, a few dozen are extremely common — we call these the free software gang.

Thunderbird, is a great choice for any desktop e-mail user. Anyone who wants an optimized interface with more features than can be provided by a webmail interface will be delighted by the experience Thunderbird delivers, and this goes doubly so for heavy email users.

The almighty media player and, for more advanced users, streamer and recorder with support for virtually every media format in existence, is VLC. It's even able to play broken and incomplete media fragments without a hitch. Although VLC is extremely powerful, it is all contained in a lightweight and minimalistic interface.